All images © Zheng Andong
How to Unname a Tree dismantles the notion of trees as static symbols, revealing them as beings that blur the lines between history, identity, and colonial legacies
In Zheng Andong’s How to Unname a Tree, the tree is not the romantic subject we’re used to seeing it presented as. Instead, there is something almost ominous about these beings. Trees have a very different understanding of history and movement; though we see them as stationary things, trees are migrating all the time. Andong’s work highlights how the migration histories of the native trees of East Asia might reflect human identities in ways we cannot see at first glance.
I meet Andong over breakfast outside our hotel in Xiamen, China. He’s exhibiting How to Unname a Tree at this year’s Jimei x Arles festival. He tells me that it’s exciting to be presenting at the festival this year; in its 10th edition, he’s part of the Discovery Award. He’s in good company with peers he admires and feels inspired by. There is a recurring diasporic intervention in this year’s edition, which Andong is a part of.
“How do visual similarities conceal and reveal differences at the same time?”
Born in a mountainous province of Eastern China, Andong moved to the US a few years ago to study. He now lives in Rotterdam, though he travels home regularly. In his hometown’s region, he encountered a pine tree with conflicting names in different languages – the Huangshan pine, a famous landmark on Huangshan Mountain – sparking an inquiry into the colonial and geopolitical implications of botanical nomenclature, particularly in East Asia.
A day prior, I was lucky enough to be toured through the show by Andong, where he showed me the ways in which he applies innovative printing techniques with traditional Japanese paper which is so thin and fibrous it resembles an opaque fabric. Andong prints his images onto the paper-fabric, giving it an organic and ethereal feel which directly echoes the nature of his black and white images.
Zheng’s photographs of pine trees from different regions – Huangshan in China, Taiwan, and Japan – are printed on East Asian paper sourced from Taiwan, historically linked to Japanese colonial paper mills. The paper is treated with seawater, introducing a natural and historical element to the prints. The salt in the water interacts with silver nitrate to create light-sensitive surfaces, embedding the images with both a physical and metaphorical connection to natural history. This process symbolises how natural history predates colonial divisions, challenging fixed notions of borders and territories.
If we consider colonial history on one time scale and natural history on a much broader one, Andong tells me, we can see how dramatically the world has changed over thousands of years. Around 20,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Maximum, sea levels were roughly 100 metres lower than today, reshaping the geography of entire regions. What is now the East China Sea was not a body of water but a vast landmass, with no strait separating Taiwan from China or Okinawa, Andong continues. “Instead, these areas were connected, allowing people, plants, and animals to migrate freely. Much of this migration happened naturally, sometimes driven by random events like powerful Pacific storms carrying species across great distances.”
“When the audience asks me, ‘where is this [tree] from? Taiwan? I can’t really solve this.’ That’s what I want. Because why would you want to know? Does that bring you more knowledge or bring you more stereotypes?”
In order to obscure the geographical location of the tree, the exhibition is deliberately designed to resist categorisation, preventing viewers from easily identifying which tree belongs to which region. Large prints on delicate Kozo paper (Japanese paper) create a ghostly, floating effect, reinforcing themes of ambiguity and interconnectedness. Viewers are encouraged to physically interact with the work, lifting layers of prints, mirroring the act of unlearning rigid taxonomies. Zheng wants the audience to question their impulse to categorise.
Andong is also interested in the intersection of photography and botanical classification, highlighting how both mediums rely on systems of naming and categorisation. His work attempts to sever these rigid connections, creating an open space for reinterpretation, describing the naming of trees as part of a broader colonial legacy that continues to shape geopolitical conflicts and national identities in East Asia.
“There is a myth about photographic truth,” claims Andong. In reality, while a camera lens directly records what is in front of it, the process of capturing an image is not purely objective. “A photograph is an index of a moment in time and space, connecting the physical world to a film plane or digital sensor,” the photographer expands. This creates an enduring link between the past and the present, but it does not guarantee an unfiltered or unbiased representation of reality.
Andong critiques the dematerialisation of photography in the digital age, advocating for the physicality of images as meaningful objects, whilst teasing out the experience of diaspora and the challenges of navigating identity across different cultural and historical contexts. By unnaming, we might go some way to reimagining our relationship with identity and labels, both in the natural and the human worlds.
The project reflects on the tense political climate in East Asia, particularly the strained relations between China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. Andong aims to provide an alternative discourse, using trees as a neutral subject to discuss broader issues of identity, migration, and historical trauma. By drawing parallels between natural and human migration, How to Unname a Tree illustrates how plants have long moved freely before modern borders disrupted these patterns.
“It’s really asking this very core question,” he continues. “How do visual similarities conceal and reveal differences at the same time?”
